The Greens have discovered that a lot of anti-AGW activity is fake, being secretly funded by multi-billionaires and corporations with commercial interests in pumping out CO2 and other greenhouse gases. The way this is being written up is meant to give the impression that all the criticism of the Green movement is motivated by these base motives. I'd just like to say that, though I am persona non grata in various forums for my negative comments on Greens and AGW activity, I have never received any funding from any source. I'll list some of my criticisms below, but first let me make a new one:
The Green/AGW movement seems incorrectly content about the move from coal burning to natural gas burning. This, they say, will allow us to meet our initial goals of 5-20% reduction in CO2 emissions, on the road to the necessary eventual reduction of 80% and more. Yes it does make that first step easy, but then it acts as an impediment to any further steps. The reason is that it creates infrastructure for burning natural gas and that infrastructure can't easily be abandoned. I suppose the Green/AGW folk imagine that a higher carbon price, or other government action, will mean that the natural gas burning company will be unable to meet its costs, including interest payments on the construction cost, and this will force it to close. But this misunderstands how capitalism works. In an unregulated world what would happen is that the owner would go bankrupt. Then its assets would be sold. The buyer would then have a lower capital cost to fund with interest payments. And so the new owner can make electricity more cheaply without going broke. It is as if the infrastructure, being there, wants to be used. And the infrastructure is more than just the electricity plant: it includes gas drilling equipment, pipelines, various sorts of human expertise, and more. Of course this is just words. You would need a good model of the economy (and the technology and the geology and more) to really know how important my point is, but I don't get the impression the proponents of natural gas have even given this matter any thought.
Here are some other points I have made:
1. Modern nuclear power is the only chance for energy that is cheap and reliable enough to displace fossil fuels. Renewable energy (and CCS) are so implausible as a power source for modern civilization that they can only be regarded as a front for the fossil fuel industries. And what do we see when countries move away from nuclear power? Lots of talk about renewables and lots of quiet implementation of coal burning.
2. We need to try to understand the climate so that we can manage it. The Greens insist that we need to avoid effecting the natural world, and put up with the consequences. This puts the Greens firmly against the ordinary voter and makes it impossible to get countries like Canada and Russia onside. We need the world to be on the warm and wet side of natural to feed 10 billion people. In particular we need to expend more effort trying to understand what happened at the end of the previous interglacial when the sea level (a proxy for temperature) rose gradually throughout the interglacial, before plummeting at amazing speed for thousands of years at the end. It seems to me that one needs to worry about what happens when Arctic water warms up, increasing the amount of open water. This can lead to more snow on the surrounding land and one must consider how this might interact with natural events such as a period of weak sun (which we seem to be getting right now) and a big volcanic eruption (which has been recently shown to happen regularly without the need for additional input from the movement of magma).
3. Greens who aren't scientists often say that others shouldn't be allowed to have opinions on AGW because they aren't scientists (or aren't climate scientists). This makes everybody suspicious. Indeed it would be a good thing if we could get all the old socialists who have drifted over to the Greens to shut up.
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